A sock dog extravaganza and a belated birthday bracelet.
Categories: uncategorized
Date: 25 April 2006 15:45:36
Varying success with the sock dogs, as you can see.
The stripey blue one on the left was the 'make this one to see how it goes' one, which turned out better than the others, which is just typical. It's not child friendly though, because of the button eyes.
The middle one (blue spotty) belongs to baby b. You can't see very well on the photo, but I thought it would be cute to make it with much shorter legs - a kind of daschund sock dog. Unfortunately this means that the head is a bit vast in proportion so it looks a bit odd. Also, the eyes, the eeeeeyes! What's going on with them? They're too big, that's what!
Lastly, the pink stripey one which was delivered to a friend's daughter this morning. (She liked it: phew.) This one wasn't too bad, but I did feel that if there was a fault with the first one, it was that there wasn't enough stuffing, especially around where the back legs joined the body, it was a bit floppy. So I tried to stuff the pink one a bit more firmly. This is difficult when using stretchy fabric such as socks. It just kept growing and growing. It's actually okay when you're not looking at it next to the original blue stripey one, but if they are together the pink one looks a bit... Elephant-Dog-ish.
It has been lovely to make things which take and evening rather than two years though!
This is the [deleted] I rambled about a while back:
Actually these aren't the actual ones because they went through many incarnations before I was happy to send them. These are the first ones.
I'd wanted to make a button bracelet for a while, but I thought that maybe unusual buttons would be even better than plain round ones. So when I saw these little beauties on eBay I was sold. They made their way to me all the way from Singapore (still so impressed with that). However when I made the bracelets they were a bit more childish than I had anticipated (the recipient being 17!), which makes me think that maybe plain round ones would have been the way to go. I took them apart and remade them a few times, and in the end settled for one the same size as those shown, but with purple buttons only. She liked it, apparently: phew again.
(I am toying with one for myself using plain brown buttons and pale blue thread though - I think that would look v cool.)
This giving presents you've made yourself thing can be a bit nervewracking. I'm always a bit scared it might be interpreted as the height of arrogance ("she thinks her blue-peter style junk is good enough to give away, does she?! She'll be trying to sell it next!"), but generally I wouldn't give anything I wouldn't use or wear myself. I do know some people think that one should stop giving homemade gifts when one leaves primary school, but I disagree. I think. The problem sometimes is that you've been so involved in the making of something, and looked at it so closely for so long, that you can't see whether it's any good or not. The bracelet was accompanied by a note saying just that, and that if she wanted to give it to a passing 10-year-old, or rip it apart and use the buttons, I wouldn't mind a bit!